Few questions about panda and penguin

[cbielich]

I seem to be a little confused about how SEO has changed recently and what things should be avoided even though I am still seeing these things impacted on my site. The recent panda and penguin updates have scared many of us SEO'ers into thinking that keyword optimization is now a no-no as apposed to how it used to be necessary. Let me explain

Concerning keyword optimization in the past in SEO we would practice placing keywords into our pages to make sure we are properly optimizing for such keywords. For instance bolding keywords, placing them in content, titles and descriptions. With panda Google seems to be negativly impacting the use of over optimization with keywods and it is what is preached about on most SEO blogs now, but I have been experimenting with such things with my sites and have noticed a few things.

Before the panda update I used to rank with my main site on a particular keyword in second place. While the panda update effected me negatively with ranking it was not so much the ranking that hurt me as apposed to the adsense revenue. I used to place consistently second place with my keyword, since panda I have dropped on average to 4th - 7th place, almost changing daily. The ranking was not so much a drop but the adsense revenue difference a month is about 2,000 which did impact me. Since then I have been going over panda rules and making the appropriate changes like getting rid of low quality content, to many keywords, ad placement. I am one who likes to experiment all the time so there are a few things that I have discovered with my diligence. I have noticed that when I cross a threshhold of about 5 repeated keywords on a page I am safe, when I begin to add more than 5 I start to notice a drop in ranking. If I go back to 5 and under I tend to rank back up. As well with that I have noticed that the placement of the keywords also impacts my ranking. When I place keywords more spread out over my page I see better rankings, if I tend to optimize my keyword more on the top portion of my page I see a drop in ranking.

My question is even though keyword optimization is considered a no-no I still see that it will impact my rankings greatly. Since everything I read kind of goes against this I am wanting to hear your opinions about this.

Another issue is relative content and the amount of pages/articles. It seems that to many pages or articles will flag you as a spam site. Now the idea of less is more is the practice we see. If this is the case then what I am questioning is how is it that google can determine a sites quality based on less. With less to use, google would have to have some serious and definitive triggers to determine the quality of the site. Can one simple page really change your ranking that much? How in the world does google determine the quality with just a few pages as apposed to many?

My site freescrabbledictionary.com (and no I am not back linking right now :)) I am a scrabble based site that helps users find words and definitions for scrabble games and other word games. On some of my pages I have articles/pages which give users important info like 2 letter words, high scoring words and other stuff. When I show these words I place a link on every word to my dictionary portion so users can easily click the link and look up the word and its definition. Some of these pages show over a thousand words, so yes I have a thousand links on that page to other pages on my site. I want to keep this feature so users don't have to type in the word to look it up, but I am torn as to if this is hurting me as apposed to helping. I would love some info on this please.

[VictorVC]

If you listen to Matt Cutts, the advice would be to think about the user experience. If those links on that page make it easier for the user and makes your page better, than that is how Google would tell you to go. You said that kewyword optimization is a no-no, but Google says OVER optimization is a no-no. In my opinion, I think they are referring to linking over-optimization for a particular keyword and lack of link diversity, creating an unnatural-looking linking pattern.